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Expand steps to combat AIDS, UNICEF urges

"With children increasingly at risk from HIV/AIDS, there is an urgent need for expanded programmes of treatment and protection, including education and AIDS awareness training," Ms. Bellamy said. "As the United Nations Secretary-General has noted, education and information are among the most powerful weapons we can bring to bear in this struggle."

She said awareness of the problem of how children and young people are affected by HIV/AIDS must be built by promoting the principles enshrined in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child; by disseminating information to young people on the risks of transmission and methods of prevention; and by offering education and services in sexual health.

"Knowing the power of one's enemy is the first step in vanquishing it," she said. "Until governments, grassroots organizations and the private sector fully grasp how vast a shadow HIV/AIDS has cast over the world's children, the expanded, urgent measures necessary to protect and treat them will that much harder to mobilize."

"But time is short," she said. "We now know that the human immuno-deficiency virus, which was virtually unknown to medical science until relatively recently, will be a major killer of children within little more than a decade, and that the majority of deaths will be in those countries that are least able to absorb the loss of so many young people."

"These are losses that will not only ravage families, but cause incalculable harm to these countries' prospects for development and economic well-being."

Ms. Bellamy spoke amid new data from the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) that the AIDS epidemic, far from slowing down, is accelerating much more rapidly than expected in parts of the developing world, especially sub-Saharan Africa; and a warning by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) that the number of children orphaned by the disease will explode in especially vulnerable developing countries over the next 12 years.

UNICEF and its partners in the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) estimate that if the spread of AIDS is not slowed, infant mortality in the hardest-hit regions in the year 2010 will soar by as much as 75 per cent and that under-five mortality will jump by over 100 per cent.

The number of HIV-infected children in 1997, which is growing at a rate of well over 1,000 cases a day, will reach one million by year's end, up from 830,000 at the end of last year.

UNAIDS estimates that by mid-1996, nine million children under the age of 15 had lost their mothers to AIDS, more than 90 per cent of them in sub-Saharan Africa. The USAID report, which focused on 23 countries heavily affected by AIDS, projects that 42.6 million children will lose parents to AIDS in the next 12 years.

"Surely one of the most complex and destructive consequences of the situation is the plight of children who escape the disease, only to see one or more parents die of it," Ms. Bellamy said. "The loss of parents is traumatic enough. But AIDS orphans face the additional burden of prejudice and social exclusion. Isolated and reviled, denied their right to education and proper nourishment, such children easily fall into a vicious circle of deepening poverty that puts them at even higher risk of contracting AIDS."

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